A long incoherence

This week, MPs are set to vote, quite unexpectedly, on the total decriminalisation of abortion in the UK. Many will tell you that they’re not, but they are. And although onlookers have been surprised to see this sudden possibility thrust into the headlines, it makes perfect sense. For decades, the UK legal system has been deeply confused when it comes to abortion. This upcoming vote is simply the culmination of years of morally reprehensible incoherence.

Two Labour MPs, Tonia Antoniazzi and Stella Creasey, have proposed amendments to the government’s Crime and Policing Bill. The former’s amendment (NC1) aims to disapply criminal law from women regarding their own abortions. Creasey’s amendment (NC20) aims to disapply the law from “healthcare” professionals who administer abortions, by insisting that the law incorporate the recommendations of paragraphs 85 and 86 of a 2018 report from the UN’s Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). These amendments would repeal entirely the 1929 Infant Life (Preservation) Act and parts of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861.

In practice, these amendments would make abortion legal in the UK up until the point of birth. Yes, really, they would. Our current 24 week limit would remain on paper, but it would be a fig leaf for a permanently stained national conscience. According to NC1, “no offence is committed by a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy.” According to NC20, “No investigation may be carried out, and no criminal proceedings may be brought or continued” against abortion providers under the aforementioned acts. And so, whilst we likely wouldn’t see abortions beyond 24 weeks being offered officially, anyone who procured or performed one would be exempt from prosecution.

The scenarios made possible by these amendments are truly monstrous. Imagine this: In a hospital neonatal unit, a mother who gave birth prematurely takes it upon herself to kill her child born at 25 weeks gestation. She is justly tried and sentenced for murder. Yet at the precise moment she was carrying out her crime, another mother was procuring abortion pills over the phone to terminate her 25 week pregnancy, for which she will suffer no consequences.

In most of Europe, the limit is on average half of ours, around the end of the first trimester

The incoherence here is obvious. It would almost be more respectable if Creasey and co. would openly campaign for the abolition of the 24 week limit, rather than simply try to defang it via legislative sleight of hand. Yet they know that such a position is deeply unpopular — only 1 per cent of the UK population support abortion up to birth, according to a 2017 poll by Savanta ComRes.

Historically, social liberals have two methods for forcing through policies favoured by the progressive elite but which lack the support of the British public. The first is the canny use of Private Members Bills, dressing them up as “free votes” for MP’s consciences whilst behind the scenes the government makes it very clear how things should go. This is how reforms around abortion, homosexuality, divorce, and the death penalty came about under Labour in the 1960s, and is precisely what has been happening with Kim Leadbeater’s current assisted suicide bill. The second method, favoured here by Creasey and Antoniazzi, is to smuggle such policies in as amendments to larger, less controversial bills, often with dull or nice sounding names. The Local Government Act 2003, for instance, contained an amendment which repealed Section 28. Pro-transgender activists did something similar with the Equality Act 2010. 

The UK’s legislative incoherence goes back further and down deeper than these unwanted amendments, however. 

Almost to their credit, Creasey and Antoniazzi are seeking to make official something which has already become practice in the UK. The highly astroturfed PR campaign for their amendments has been organised around stories such as that of Nicola Packer, who was recently cleared of having an illegal abortion at 26 weeks in 2020, via pills taken at home, despite the legal limit for such home-use abortifacients being 10 weeks. The drugs were prescribed through the controversial Pills By Post scheme, originally introduced as a temporary measure during the COVID lockdowns but made permanent thanks to the House of Lords in March 2022. (Curiously, an amendment enjoying cross-party support has also been put forward to the Crime and Policing Bill to end the scheme). 

Our abortion confusion goes back yet further. Last year, the government expanded its baby loss certificate scheme, which allows all UK parents who have ever experienced a miscarriage prior to 24 weeks gestation to receive “a certificate in memory of your baby.” Miscarriages after 24 weeks are counted as stillbirths. The reason the scheme stops at this point is because 24 weeks is the UK abortion limit. Yet this of course means that the UK government could, on the same day, be sending out certificates to comfort one mother on her “lost baby” at 23 weeks whilst simultaneously scheduling another mother to “abort her foetus” at the same point of gestation. This is an absurd situation. A government governs persons and so it cannot be ambivalent about who is a person and who is not. It is either a lost baby or an aborted foetus, it cannot be both simultaneously.

We can also consider the incoherence of the 24 week limit itself. The UK is a liberal outlier in Europe when it comes to abortion. Our current 24 week term is the joint latest in Europe, alongside the Netherlands. Yet in most of Europe, the limit is on average half of that, around the end of the first trimester. In Belgium, Denmark, Finland, and Germany it’s 12 weeks. In France and Spain, 14 weeks. In Croatia and Portugal, ten. Pointing this fact out usually elicits an awkward silence from progressives who like to think the UK’s biggest problems is that it is insufficiently European.

It wasn’t always 24 weeks, either. The Abortion Act 1967 set the limit at 28 weeks. This was reduced to 24 by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990, on the grounds that improved medical technology had changed the criteria for viability outside the womb. It was understood that it did not make logical, scientific, or moral sense to abort children who, had they been born prematurely at the same age, could have survived. Neonatology has only improved since the 1990s, and should trouble hugely the UK’s 24 week limit. For instance, in utero fetoscopic repair surgery for spina bifida involves the administration of pain relief to unborn children at 19-26 weeks gestation. It should boggle the mind that, knowing what we know about foetal development in 2025, we would still allow abortion at this stage in a pregnancy. This point has finally made some headway in UK politics recently, with Nigel Farage (who is pro-choice) calling our current setup “ludicrous” and “out of date”. Ironically, pro-abortion voices in the UK often try to undermine criminalisation of abortion by labelling it a piece of “Victorian legislation”. If “progress” is on anyone’s side in this debate though, it’s that of the restrictionists.

It seems likely that Antoniazzi’s amendment, if selected, will pass. Creasey’s will have a tougher time of it, though may well make it through. The moral landscape in which we will then find ourselves will be a barren and barbaric one. Even if both amendments fail, the UK’s approach to abortion will remain as confused as it has ever been, and it will only be a matter of time before someone tries to make it even more so. Leonard Cohen summed it all up in his song “The Future”: “Destroy another foetus now/We don’t like children, anyhow/I’ve seen the future, baby: It is murder.”